On Thursday, September 26 at 6pm the Hannah Arendt Center will be holding a public conversation about Richard Rodriguez’s book Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. This discussion, led by the center’s director Prof. Roger Berkowitz, will address the tensions between cultural identity and U.S. citizenship, the responsibilities inherent in citizenship, and what it means to live a ‘public life. The event is open to the public, free, and sponsored by the New York Council for the Humanities.

Using the South African Mark Behr’s controversial novel The Smell of Apples (1995) as a springboard, this paper both examines the psychological dimensions of repression in apartheid South Africa and explores largely uncharted military connections between the apartheid government and dictatorial regimes in Argentina, Chile and other South American states. It ultimately suggests that reading across the South Atlantic ocean–and through frames including the (failed) South Atlantic Treaty Organization as well as those of national and transnational liberation movements–can help to decenter Cold War historiography and open up understandings of cultural and political flows across the Global South.

Keep an eye out for this exciting lecture, the first of the Tuesday series sponsored by the Human Rights Project at Bard.

This year (2013), Wave Books published the first English translation of Mario Santiago Papasquiaro’s early long poem, “Advice from 1 disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger fanatic,” translated by Cole Heinowitz and Bard alum, Alexis Graman, with an introduction by Cole Heinowitz. On July 8th, Heinowitz’s translation of Santiago’s later poem “Already far from the road” appeared on Jerome Rothenberg’s blog, Poems and Poetics (http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/search?q=santiago).

The short film about Federico García Lorca, “Flota mi cuerpo entre los equilibrios contrarios,” directed by Peter Valente and Cole Heinowitz, was screened on May 1st at the CUNY Graduate Center as part of “The After Lorca Festival.”

Media professionals at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication in collaboration with history and cultural scholars, have produced a 60-minute film to bring awareness to the world about the repercussions from the Dirty War and its on-going cultural, social, political, ethical, human rights, and economic effects.

This project is grounded in the search for identity and the “moral of the story” is that the right to identity is a fundamental human right. It will focus on the development of a 60-minute documentary film about the educational movement headed by Las Abuelas. The film presents historical and cultural facts, and features interviews with Las Abuelas and the ‘found’ grandchildren. The main question we hope to answer: “is the right to identity a basic human right?”

About the Story

Some people know little about los desaparecidos of Argentina. As many as 30,000 dissidents of the military dictatorship were kidnapped, tortured and killed during The Dirty War, between 1976 and 1983. In Argentina today, there is a movement underway headed by a group called Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, or The Grandmothers of May Plaza.

These women are dedicated to finding their missing grandchildren, the babies who were taken from pregnant women during the Dirty War. The women were captured and murdered and their babies were given to supporters of the military regime. Now in their 20s and 30s, these “lost” grandchildren have no knowledge of their past or of their true identities. Las Abuelas is trying to change that. Through direct interviews with Las Abuelas, the found grandchildren, and other members of their families and communities, we seek to tell the story as it is still unfolding and bring the historical and cultural context that is needed to help people around the world understand the impact that such a crisis has for people from many different generations.

-Joseph Sorrentino, photographer from Rochester, NY, who will be showing his photographs of what life is like for impoverished Mexican immigrants in both sides of the border, and the crisis of the Mexican countryside (currently on display a Bard College Campus Center).

Thursday, November 3rd, at 6pm

Preston Hall Theatre, Bard College

Refreshments will be served

Sponsored by: Latin American and Iberian Studies Program at Bard College, La Voz magazine, Latin American Students Organization and International Students Organization.

Kate Doyle, a Senior Analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America, currently directs the Mexico Project, which aims to obtain documents on U.S.-Mexican relations. She edited two of the Archive’s collections of declassified records – Death Squads, Guerrilla War, Covert Operations, and Genocide: Guatemala and the United States, 1954-1999 and El Salvador: War, Peace and Human Rights, 1980-1994 – and numerous Electronic Briefing Books on Guatemala and Mexico for the Archive’s Web site. Since 1992, Doyle has worked with Latin American human rights organizations and truth commissions – in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras – to obtain the declassification of U.S. government archives in support of their investigations. She co-authored the 1994 report of the Washington Task Force on Salvadoran Death Squads, produced for the U.N.-appointed “Grupo Conjunto,” which examined the resurgence of death squads in El Salvador after the signing of the peace accords. She published the Guatemalan death squad dossier in Harper’s Magazine, and led the group of human rights organizations who briefed the press on the dossier in May 1999. In September 2002, Doyle appeared as an expert witness in the trial of senior military officers in Guatemala for the assassination of Myrna Mack. Doyle also works with citizens groups throughout the region on their campaigns for government transparency, accountability and freedom of information, and has written about the right to information in Latin America and the United States. She is a member of the advisory boards of the World Policy Journal, the Journal of the Right to Information, Libertad de Información-México and the Fund for Constitutional Government in Washington. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe, World Policy Journal, Current History, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, and other publications. She now lives in Mexico City, directing the Mexico Project for the Archive and serving as a Research Fellow at the Iberoamerican University. In 2002, Doyle was awarded the Iberoamerican University’s annual “Right to Information Prize.”